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Assesses the range and magnitude of Robert Gardner's achievements as a filmmaker, photographer, writer, educator, and champion of independent cinema.
During his lifetime, Robert Gardner (1925—2014) was often pigeonholed as an ethnographic filmmaker, then criticized for failing to conform to the genre's conventions-conventions he radically challenged. With the release of his groundbreaking film Dead Birds in 1963, Gardner established himself as...
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An authoritative and comprehensive guide to cinema's first true blockbuster.
"Best moving pictures I ever saw." Thus did one Vaudeville theater manager describe Georges Méliès's A Trip to the Moon [Le Voyage dans la lune], after it was screened for enthusiastic audiences in October 1902. Cinema's first true blockbuster, A Trip to the Moon still inspires such superlatives and continues to be widely viewed on DVD, on the Internet, and in countless...
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Engaging essays on a wide spectrum of Hollywood directors and the films they created.
Journalist and filmmaker Bill Krohn has been the Los Angeles correspondent for the French magazine Cahiers du cinéma for over forty years. Letters from Hollywood brings together thirty-four of his essays, many of them appearing in English for the first time. Focusing most pieces on a particular director and film, Krohn uses his inside knowledge of the studio system...
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In this book, Jonah Corne and Monika Vrečar offer a conceptually innovative reexamination of Yiddish cinema, a crucial yet little-known diasporic phenomenon that enjoyed its "golden age" in the mid-to late 1930s. Yiddish cinema, they argue, exhibits a distinctive fascination with media forms, technologies, and institutions, and with relationality writ large. What stands behind this communication obsession, as it might be understood, is the films'...
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Drawing on a broad range of primary sources, from trade and government publications to interviews, Hollywood Films in North Africa and the Middle East traces the circulation of Hollywood films across the region from the early twentieth century to the present. Originally introduced by French distributors, Hollywood films have been a key component of film culture in North Africa and the Middle East. These films became a favored mode of entertainment...
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The first collection of essays devoted to the phenomenon of the film sequel.
Sequels, serials, and remakes have been a staple of cinema since the very beginning, and recent years have seen the emergence of dynamic and progressive variations of these multi-film franchises. Taking a broad range of sequels as case studies, from the Godfather movies to the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, Second Takes confronts the complications posed by film sequels...
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Examines movie romance in light of our emotional bond to the actors and characters on screen.
Gestures of Love considers the viewer's enchantment with charismatic actors in film as the starting point for closely analyzing the performance of love in movies. Written with a thoughtful adoration for the actors who move us, Steven Rybin examines several of cinema's most beloved on-screen movie couples, including Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant, Myrna...
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The Hard Sell of Paradise examines how mid-twentieth-century Hollywood, negotiating the rhetoric of the tourism industry, offered a complex and contradictory vision of "Hawai'i" for its audiences. From the classic studio system and elite tourism of the 1930s to a postwar era of mass travel, TV, and new leisure markets, the book explores how an eclectic group of populist media reflected the language of tourism not only through its narratives of leisure,...
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This eloquent book draws on the author's responses to a wide range of extraordinary films-"long takes" on Altman's Nashville, Godard's Hail Mary, Makavejev's WR: Mysteries of the Organism, and von Sternberg's Blonde Venus, as well as "short takes" on films by Jean Rouch, Chris Marker, Chantal Akerman, Ross McElwee, Michelangelo Antonioni, Michael Haneke, and Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. Charles Warren's masterful close readings blend profound philosophical...
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Uses comedy skits, from Monty Python to Key and Peele, to probe how humor works.
What makes something funny? This book shows how humor can be analyzed without killing the joke. Alex Clayton argues that the brevity of a sketch or skit and its typical rejection of narrative development make it comedy-concentrate, providing a rich field for exploring how humor works. Focusing on a dozen or so skits and scenes, Clayton shows precisely how sketch comedy...
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White Cottage, White House examines how Classical Hollywood cinema developed and deployed Irish American masculinities to negotiate, consolidate, and reinforce hegemonic whiteness in midcentury America. Largely confined to discriminatory stereotypes during the silent era, Irish American male characters emerge as a favored identity with the introduction of sound, positioned in a variety of roles as mediators between the marginal and mainstream. The...
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An expanded edition of a classic work of film criticism, with a provocative and eloquent new chapter on Marnie, Hitchcock's most heartfelt--and most controversial--film.
First published in 1982, William Rothman's Hitchcock is a classic work of film criticism. Written in an engaging style that is philosophically sophisticated yet free of jargon, and using over nine hundred images from the films to illustrate and back up its critical claims, the...
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Orienting Italy explores contemporary Italian filmmakers' fascination with China and the Chinese in both documentary and fictional films. Delineating the contours of this fascination, the book begins with the works of Carlo Lizzani (Behind the Great Wall, 1958) and Michelangelo Antonioni (Chung Kuo-China, 1972), both of whom ventured to China with the aim of documenting new, yet physically and culturally distant, realities. Their documentary investigations...
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Considers the ways in which Alfred Hitchcock adapted and transformed a variety of literary works-novels, plays, and short stories-into film.
The adaptation of literary works to the screen has been the subject of increasing, and increasingly sophisticated, critical and scholarly attention in recent years, but most studies of the subject have continued to privilege literature over film by taking the literary sources as their starting point. Rather...
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Examines the complexities and contradictions that arise when the monsters in the movies are children.
Since the 1950s, children have provided some of horror's most effective and enduring villains, from dainty psychopath Rhoda Penmark of The Bad Seed (1956) and spectacularly possessed Regan MacNeil of The Exorcist (1973) to psychic ghost-girl Samara of The Ring (2002) and adopted terror Esther of Orphan (2009). Using a variety of critical approaches,...
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Reluctant Sleuths, True Detectives examines the detective figure in four noir and neo-noir films: Out of the Past (1947), Notorious (1946), Vertigo (1958), and Chinatown (1974). Exploring the way that these characters each move from an initial state of reluctant passivity to one of passionate engagement with the world around them, it questions the cinematic forces required to motivate and move them. In its close examinations of each film, the book...
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From the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s, Japan experienced an unprecedented level of economic growth, transforming itself from a war-devastated country to a global economic power. Our image of postwar Japan has been shaped by this event, and we tend to see its history as a story of great national success. Cinema of Discontent challenges this view and details the tensions generated by massive and intense capitalist development through analyses of popular...
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How Hollywood biopics both showcase and modify various notions of what it means to be an American.
Biopics-films that chronicle the lives of famous and notorious figures from our national history-have long been one of Hollywood's most popular and important genres, offering viewers various understandings of American national identity. Invented Lives, Imagined Communities provides the first full-length examination of US biopics, focusing on key releases...
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Considers how dangerous beasts in horror films illuminate the human-animal relationship.
It's always been a wild world, with humans telling stories of killer animals as soon as they could tell stories at all. Movies are an especially popular vehicle for our fascination with fierce creatures. In Brute Force, Dominic Lennard takes a close look at a range of cinematic animal attackers, including killer gorillas, sharks, snakes, bears, wolves, spiders,...
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